A real-time traffic alert system based on image recognition: A case of study in Spain

The management of road traffic incidents is a problem faced by governments in many countries. Normally, road operators have the infrastructure in place to monitor such incidents, albeit in a reactive manner. In Spain, there are traffic cameras on major roads to check for possible incidents, however, incident notification is slow and not automated. As an alternative, this paper proposes a system for automatic real-time traffic alerts. Thus, 1,500 camera images from the Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT) deployed on the main Spanish roads are analyzed in real time every 4 minutes. These images are not preprocessed, they have different qualities and are also affected by weather conditions such as fog, rain, sun reflections, etc. The system uses several Deep Learning classification models trained on a well-known dataset of traffic images including flowing traffic, dense traffic, accidents and fires. These models are used to classify the DGT images in real time, with satisfactory initial results, detecting both flowing traffic and dense traffic.